More about AskJeeves

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ogi

7:44 pm on May 30, 2002 (gmt 0)

Inactive MemberAccount Expired

Hello!!! (This forum is a great discovery for me!!) I am a student of Information Science from Barcelona (Spain). I am currently doing a dissertation on the search engine Ask Jeeves (I've never heard it before but i think now that it is very interesting) and I'd like learn more about Ask Jeeves: i. e. How many spiders works at one time? How works these web spider? (meta tags, words occurring in the title, full text...), How builds index? (significant word on a page leaving out the articles, NLP,...), How store the information? What is the method by which the information is indexed? The knowledge database its only compiled by human editors? What criteria uses to rank? (formula for assigning weight to the words in its index), Does it really NLP or only use boolean operators?,...

Senior Member

Ask Jeeves, like the chaps suggest is a PPC based engine, however it has a few subsiduaries that are not. The main one, which is focused upon by various members of Webmasterworld is Teoma.

Teoma, is pretty much the creme of the crop for the Ask Jeeves corporation. It, along with Direct Hit, makes Ask Jeeves and various incarnations, Ask George (Washington State Governments internet search provider). Ask Alex, UK based business directory, and their partnerships with massive companies around the world, such as Ford, make AJ, certainly a contender, and we at webmasterworld are waiting to see if Teoma (Ask Jeeves), is going to challenge Google.

By Far the best thread that has kicked off on Teoma, and Ask Jeeves as a company is Brett's write up of an interview he had with them. Teoma hits the ground running [webmasterworld.com]. This thread gives a very succinct view of Teoma, and explains the various assets of Ask Jeeves. As well as some advanced reading topics, spiders, and so on. Their are also many contributions from members of Webmasterworld. I would suggest reading this thread in its entirety and this should provide enough fuel for finding all their is about the Ask Jeeves corp.

Senior Member

I agree, i've never paid to be indexed by any of Ask Jeeves properties, and the sites are listed in most of them bar Direct Hit, which no longer matters.

ogi

5:30 pm on May 31, 2002 (gmt 0)

Inactive MemberAccount Expired

Hi!

Thank you very much for replies!! But I need more help... I have read all the information pages at ask.com and teoma.com, but I don't understand how works exactly the natural language processing system of Ask Jeeves: how translate the search terms into questions of knowledge database? Can recognise phrases, synonymous, ...?

Preferred Member

joined:Apr 15, 2002
posts:398
votes: 0

>I don't understand how works exactly the natural language processing system of Ask Jeeves:<

I can't tell you how it works, but I don't think it translates very well to generating traffic. My site ranks #2 on Teoma after only two sponsored links for my most important Keyword phase, and I still get virtually no traffic. On top of that my listing is many months old, even though the Ask spider comes around for a peak once in a while.

IMHO I think Teoma has an awful lot of tweaking to do before it will ever be close to a top five engine. (Although It does have some ingenious search functions.)

Preferred Member

joined:Apr 15, 2002
posts:398
votes: 0

Perhaps if you faxed them a letter on official department letterhead, possibly with a senior profs endorsement and return address (so they have a way to check). Through e-mail they have no idea whether you are who you claim to be.

To them you probably seem like you are asking for sensitive propietiary material. Possibly with a carefully worded fax you may be able to convince them to give you some information that they do not deem "secret".

Butter them up, tell them how impressed you are with their technology. Talk about what you know of their technology already. Ask some pointed questions, but emphasize that you understand if they determine that some answers may deal with material that is too sensitive.

Most "experts" love to discuss (tutor) with others who show a passion for their for their expertise.

Senior Member

joined:Apr 21, 2001
posts:2489
votes: 0

you're asling a question, which is slightly different to what i precieved.

Check out Brett's post, the advanced reading topics. If you want to know about natural language posting, check out Dr. Wallace's Alice bot, alongside the conversations that you can have with alice, the write ups on the history and theory of language processing, is quite deep. Obviously, we are talking bots on a database of terms, not a series of heuristics, that are benchmarking pages on a massive amount of factors, but the base theorem is there.

Alice Bot [alicebot.org], this will give a basis behind current natural langauge processing, then i would suggest reading Brett's post above that i gave a link too above, hopefully this will help.